ENVIRONMENT:
No Getting Around Emissions Caps, Experts Say
Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Feb 5 (IPS) - With the stark realisation that global
warming is transforming our world, there will be crazy new era of
"greenwashing", desperate "geo-engineering" schemes, "grandfathering" of
newly-built coal power plants and carbon-credit "profiteering",
environmentalists warn.
Welcome to the battle to save ourselves and
future generations from the worst impacts of climate change, like increased
floods, droughts and storms.
The scientific evidence proving that
climate change is caused by human activities is now overwhelming with the
widely-anticipated release of the Fourth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Feb. 2. And many scientists and
environmental activists say the only important scientific questions remaining
are how bad it will get and what can be done to lessen the impacts.
Most
advocate immediate and drastic reductions in the greenhouse gases like carbon
dioxide, emitted mainly in the transportation and industrial sectors, which
contribute to global warming.
But many of the most heavily
industrialised nations find the economic costs of this prescription hard to
swallow. Instead, some, led by the United States, are looking at geo-engineering
schemes -- large-scale attempts to manipulate the environment to produce
environmental change, according to the ETC Group, a Canadian-based
non-governmental organisation.
Many such schemes are currently under
scientific study, and include deliberately polluting the stratosphere with tiny
sulphur dioxide particles or putting trillions of wafer-thin reflectors into
orbit. Both of these measures are intended to deflect sunlight and cool the
Earth, according to the ETC Group's report "Gambling with Gaia" released on Feb.
1.
Other mitigation plans have already been launched over the past few
years, such as dumping tonnes of iron particles into the oceans to trigger
phytoplankton blooms in the hopes of absorbing more carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere.
"There's a little bit of panic brewing, governments are
taking these wacky ideas seriously," says Pat Mooney of the ETC Group.
Weather modification is also being explored, with a major conference on
the topic planned later this year by the World Meteorological Organisation,
Mooney told IPS.
"NASA [the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space
Administration] and the U.S. Navy are also talking about projects behind closed
doors," he said.
The U.S. government has been lobbying the IPCC to
include geo-engineering in the third part of its report to be released in May on
ways to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
However, the ETC report
warns that, "Geo-engineering is the wrong response to climate change. Any
experimentation to alter the structure of the oceans or the stratosphere should
not proceed without thorough and informed public debate on its consequences."
Meanwhile, multinational corporations and politicians are painting
themselves green and proclaiming they are taking action to reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases.
Oil giant BP America announced on Feb. 1 it was giving
a 500-million-dollar grant to the University of California at Berkeley to
research renewable fuels and clean energy.
"BP's grant is a form of
greenwashing -- so they will look greener than the other oil companies," said
Pratap Chatterjee, managing editor of the Washington-based group Corpwatch.
"What America needs to do to reduce emissions is to consume less and
build a much better public transportation system," Chatterjee said in an
interview.
Alternative fuels like ethanol will make little difference --
although they will earn profits for oil companies like BP, he said.
"Corporations bear the largest responsibility for creating global
warming and it's past time they started using their profits to truly help solve
the problem," he said.
In Canada, politicians are fighting to be the
greenest of the green. That includes Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who only a
year ago questioned the validity of the science around climate change but now
says Canada "must act" to curb global warming.
"Politicians and others
will all be saying 'we're finally tackling the issue' but it won't be true,"
said Mooney.
Instead of accepting the green spin, the public should
insist on immediate, substantial and mandatory emissions cuts in all sectors and
fines for non-compliance, he added. "Anything short of that will not work and
will just be a pretence," Mooney argued.
Knowing the green tide is
rising, there is a major rush in the U.S. to build new coal-fired power plants
before any carbon emissions caps are passed into law, says David Archer, a
climatologist at the University of Chicago.
TXU, a Dallas-based company,
plans to build 11 coal power plants in Texas in the next few years resulting in
emissions of 78 million tonnes of the global warming gas carbon dioxide every
year. Somewhere between 130 and 160 new plants have been proposed to meet the
rapidly growing energy needs of the U.S.
Once built, such power plants
can operate for 50 or more years. In the past, whenever tougher new pollution
rules came into place, existing plants were usually "grandfathered", meaning
they were exempted from having to comply with the new regulations. And that is a
major concern.
"There is at least 50 times more coal left in the ground
than oil," Archer said.
Trading in carbon credits has been one of
Europe's solutions for reducing emissions. This is a complex market-based system
where companies that emit greenhouse gases are given credits or penalties based
on their emission levels. A coal-fired power plant in Europe, for example, can
continue to emit millions of tonnes of carbon by purchasing carbon credits from
elsewhere.
Carbon trading has become a multi-billion-dollar industry and
commercial carbon traders are funding geo-engineering schemes like ocean
fertilisation in order to create "credits" they can sell to companies, the ETC
report found.
"The European carbon trading market is a complete failure.
It simply slows down the pace of emission reductions," Mooney argued.
Governments must make emissions cuts mandatory and not allow trading or
allowances, he says. "Carbon-credit profiteering is already going on and it will
get worse." (FIN/2007)
